Rich Women

I received a call today from a lady named Kate who had rung on behalf of Naomi Simson, founder of Red Balloon Days, the experience gift company. Kate opened her spiel with a reference to the BRW Rich List (whichever one is out now, they have so many it's rather boring...) saying that of the 200 people on the list, only two were women.

I feigned some kind of interest, as the call was more appropriately addressed to my editor (to whom I passed dear Kate), but then I thought about it some more. Why would only two women be part of the mega-rich?

My theory is that women do not go into business to make money as their ultimate priority. If we want to take a more stereotypical view of women, it's their caring nature that may prove the driver for their business. If this is the case, some rich list is probably not as important as being a responsible business and, for example, being named in the top 200 of the most socially responsible businesses in Australia (if there was such a list).

From my experience networking with businesswomen, plenty of them start their own business not to make lots of money but to make enough money to be sustainable so they could control other things such as their work-life balance, or do something that other businesses, under which they had worked previously, wouldn't let them do.

If you want a 'tough woman against staid corporate world' scenario, it may be that a woman who was constantly denied leave to care for her chronically ill daughter found it easier to set up her own business than fight the existing system. Sometimes they thrive, sometimes they struggle.

The other thing about being on the rich list is that generally you need to be at the head of a fairly sizeable company, and very few of these are self-made; names like Murdoch, Packer and Lowy don't appear in the top five as sole traders or as owners of the corner store. So the problem isn't that women aren't earning a lot of money (surely some are earning a pretty good salary...), but that women are not promoted to the head of large companies that they do not own for whatever reason you care to explain.

There are a lot of female entrepreneurs starting small businesses. Personally, I think the number outstrips men. Their businesses may be profitable, but the owners themselves may not be one of the 200 richest people in Australia. And a lot of them, I think, would say - 'so what? Business is good and I'm doing what I want to do.'